“I am sincerely rejoiced however that I ever
was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of
Tea.”1
So wrote Jane to Cassandra at Godmersham responding to her little
nephew George’s celebration of her birthday in
absentia. But historians, whether
“partial, prejudiced and ignorant,” in rejoicing also
over the life of England’s greatest novelist, undoubtedly will
procure the wrath of St. Swithun for their inaccurate recording of
the dates of her life.

A plethora of information based on Austen
eyewitnesses exists to verify that she was born the seventh of eight
children to the Reverend George and Cassandra Austen on December 16,
1775, and died forty-one years and two hundred fifteen days later at
4:30 a.m., Friday, July 18, 1817. Despite the multitudinous
evidence, Robert Nye wrote in the February 19, 1976 of The
Christian Science Monitor: “Jane
Austen was born 200 years ago.” Fortunate for him that he
declined a local museum’s invitation to open an exhibition in
her honour. Understandable is the confusion over just where among
the Austen’s lively offsprings she is numbered, given the
obscurity, until this century, of her second brother George’s
existence. Yet in 1980 in the York
Notes on Northanger Abbey Ian Milligan
wrote: “She was born in 1775, the third of a family of eight
children ....”

More surprising is the misdating of the sad day on
which she departed this earth. The Winchester Burial Registry has
the distinction of being at the top of this list for its record of
her death on July 16, 1817, for which there appears no explanation.
In 1969 in Jane Austen In Her Time
(!) W. A. Craik opened an otherwise excellent study: “Jane
Austen’s England is the England of the years in which she wrote
her novels; that is from the 1790’s to her death in 1816.”
Eleven years later In the Meantime’s
author Susan Morgan perpetuated the misdating: “Jane Austen
died in 1816 .....” And in the same year Ian Milligan
committed further mischief when he crop’t two years off her
already intolerably brief life in writing that “she spent the
last six years of her life in a small house on his (Edward Knight’s)
estate,” disregarding Jane’s own epistolary evidence that
she was in Chawton Cottage by July 1809.

Less scrupulous than Jane herself in regard to
dates, Douglas Bush, in getting the details otherwise correct, wrote:
“She died at Winchester on July 18, 1817, just beyond the
middle of her forty-second year,” making her thereby a year
older! Alas! that it were so. But Anne-Marie Edwards following in
Jane’s footsteps lop’t over seven months from her life
when she wrote: “Jane died peacefully in Cassandra’s
arms. She was just forty-one.” Were this so, Jane would have
been denied time to compose the first twelve chapters of a robustly
comic fragment, posthumously titled Sanditon,
as she did, according to her biographer-nephew, from January 27 to
March 17. An extra day is gained if Elizabeth Jenkins’ dating
of March 18 is allowed.

Jane Austen was a great observer of birthdays.
The very first sentence of the first extant letter opens: “In
the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer”
(p. 1), a happy birthday wish to Cassandra, who was born on January 9,
1773. Some hint as to why Jane’s chroniclers have been remiss
in dating her private life might lie in another birthday expression
of hers. When she wished “ … my Brother joy of
completing his 30th year,” on Friday, October 7, 1808, Edward,
born in 1768, would have been, not thirty, but forty years old.
Perhaps she is teasing this brother who had everything save good
health and who may have had more than the traditional dread of
approaching this decade, or perhaps it is possible that even in
family matters she was capable of making a rare slip. Let the
historians find just cause where they may. But owing our knowledge
of her as we do to J. E. Austen-Leigh’s 1870 Memoir,
beginning as it does the narrative of her life, Jane would not have
had generosity dictated to her had she known that in 1977 Brian Wilks
would identify that beloved, manly, eighteen-year-old nephew as “the
boy of nine at Jane Austen’s funeral.”